Europe & Central Asia

2004

Around the world, 122 journalists were in prison at
the end of 2004 for practicing their profession, 16 fewer than the year
before. International advocacy campaigns, including those waged by the
Committee to Protect Journalists, helped win the early release of a
number of imprisoned journalists, notably six independent writers and
reporters in Cuba.

The Toll: 1995-2004

Each year in January, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) publishes a list of journalists killed in the line of duty around the world. This list has become the most widely cited press freedom statistic and is often seen as a barometer of the state of global press freedom.

While the correlation between the number of journalists killed and the state of press freedom in a particular country is far from exact--no journalists have been killed in Cuba, for example, and only one has been killed in China during the last decade--the annual list does give some sense of the range of risks that journalists face in reporting the news. To provide a more complete statistical picture, CPJ releases a list of journalists killed during the last decade. The list has been broken down by year, country, and a variety of other categories.

Around the world, 122 journalists were in prison at the end of 2004 for practicing their profession, 16 fewer than the year before. International advocacy campaigns, including those waged by the Committee to Protect Journalists, helped win the early release of a number of imprisoned journalists, notably six independent writers and reporters in Cuba.

New York, December 17, 2004—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned that authorities in the southern Russian republic of North Ossetia have prosecuted and convicted Yuri Bagrov, a reporter who covered the North Caucasus and Chechnya for The Associated Press (AP) until September.

The Leninsky court in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia's capital, today convicted Bagrov on criminal charges of using falsified documents to obtain Russian citizenship and fined him 15,000 rubles (US$540).

NEW YORK--When Raúl Rivero was released from prison and reunited with his family in Havana last week, newspapers around the world published photographs of the smiling Cuban writer embracing his wife, Blanca.